Hidden control characters in text file

[Glenn_Suggs]

Hello all. I've come across an interesting problem that I believe is due to non-printable control characters, etc. At least I "think" this is the problem. The "Trim" function doesn't work as expected for one thing. When I display the record being read in with VBA from a text/html file (using Line Input #1, strRecIn), it appears to be a string of blanks 17 characters long. I've set break points and attempted to display the field in the immediate window and Len(strRecIn) returns 17. When I do a print Len(Trim(strRecIn)), it returns a 1, even though the cursor moves through 4 (seemingly blank) spaces. This in itself is not a problem, but my sequential read through the file seems to be thrown out of order. The text file was actually an HTML file behind a web page from which I'm trying to extract data. Doesn't it appear that control characters (or whatever) are getting in my way? Any help would be appreciated.


Glenn

[orange]

Try to do a "ctrl c" to capture / copy one of the "suspect characters",
then in your immediate window type

?ASC(" then do a ctrl v to paste the single character after the ", then add a trailing ") then hit Enter.

Access should print out the value of the "unknown character". Here's an example using a Q

?Asc("Q")
81

You can lookup what this characters is, or you can parse the original string and remove the unwanted characters.

[Glenn_Suggs]

That was a great idea. The string of "spaces" turned out to be all ASC(32) (blanks) except the last one which was ASC(9).

[orange]

You could do a replace of Chr(9) to space or whatever you need.